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Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in The Modern World

Day, A. (2011). Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social
Identity in The Modern World. Oxford:
Oxford University Press

This fascinating monograph explores the
nature of believing in modern Euro-American societies. It is based on the author’s post-doctoral
research at Lancaster University and builds on her PhD thesis, a case study
centred on the Yorkshire town of Skipton.

Day set herself the challenge of exploring
belief by asking open questions that did not presuppose that answers would be
offered in relation to religious categories.
So, for example, What do you
believe in? and, What or who is most
important to you in your life? She
then compared her findings with related studies from around the world. The research is well designed and the results
significant.

The main finding is summed up in the title:
people believe in belonging. To say they
believe is to engage in identity building by claiming belonging – to
Christianity (even if they don’t believe in God) to family (on condition that they
get to decide who qualifies as family) and to friends (with whom they work out
their problems and their opinions).

Unsurprisingly then Day suggests that Grace
Davie’s influential argument that people in Britain today believe but don’t
like to belong misses the mark. People
may not choose to participate in the activities of organised, institutional
religion but this does not mean that belonging is unimportant. On the contrary, for most people believing is
profoundly relational. People believe because they belong and in order to reinforce belonging.

This believing in belonging is found to
apply to those (the great majority) for whom believing is anthropocentric, that
is those who articulate their beliefs primarily in reference to their human
relationships. It also applies to those
for whom believing is theocentric in that they cite God and their relationship
with God as central to their lives. This
observation leads to an interesting and nuanced exploration of the phenomenon
of Christian nominalism.

Day offers us a rich picture of what it is
to believe and in the light of her research suggests that we consider seven
dimensions of the phenomenon: content,
what people believe; sources, where
beliefs originate; practice, whether
and how belief informs behavior; salience,
the importance people attribute to their beliefs; function, the role of beliefs in people’s lives; place the relationship between belief
and location whether public or private, geographic or social and time, the fluidity or fixity of beliefs
in relation to passing time and specific times.
As an interpretive framework this scheme would seem to have real
potential.

Much more could be said about what this
book has to offer; there is a Foucault inspired archeology of the concept of
belief in the fields of sociology and
anthropology; there are interesting observations on the way people limit moral
obligations to those to whom they belong and the significance for many of
ongoing relationships with the dead; there’s an investigation of young people
and belief, of believing in fate and of the “othering” of women, non-Christian
religions and “Asians” as those responsible for moral decline. All this in two hundred pages.

I have long thought that missiologists don’t
pay nearly enough careful attention to the work of sociologists of religion –
Duncan McLaren’s Mission Implausible was
a notable exception, now sadly out of print.
Abby Day writes as an academic sociologist and an active
researcher. Her findings are a helpful
contribution to the sociology of secularisation; they open an intriguing window
into believing in Britain today. Believing in Belonging makes instructive
reading, to say the least for those us concerned that our compatriots might
come to belong to the company of those who believe in Jesus.

This review was originally written for Regent's Reviews and is reproduced here with permission of the editor. Check out the web site to get a free pdf of a whole bunch of reviews.